Returning Home

From 1950 to 1984, the Intermountain Indian School was the largest federal boarding school for Native American children, and it was built to pull Diné (Navajo) students away from their families and homelands. This book gathers the art and poetry those students made there and places them in historical context. Rather than treating the students only as victims of assimilation, it shows how they kept their Diné culture alive and helped sustain their communities while living inside an institution meant to erase that culture.

The author recovers the students' experiences through three sources: their creative work, interviews with former students, and collaboration with scholars and community members. The book argues that these young people acted with real agency. Their images and poems return again and again to Diné Bikéyah, the Diné homeland, and to the family bonds that made home meaning for them, so that the students found ways to 'return home' even though the school was designed to keep them away.

The research draws on archival holdings at Utah State University and on materials donated by surviving students and teachers across Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The creative works express longing for cultural connection and reflect resilience. An earlier version of this work travelled as a museum exhibit to communities in and around the Navajo Nation, and this book makes the project available in a permanent printed form. It brings the archived student art and writing together with the voices of living communities to trace and reconnect the everyday acts of cultural survival that the students carried out.